Cotton kingdom

The Cotton kingdom was the nickname given to the American South during the boom of the cotton industry from the 1830s to the 1860s. The invention of the cotton gin led to cotton becoming a major resource in the South, as cotton's requirements were simple: two hundred frost-free days from planting to picking and plentiful rain, conditions found in much of the South. By the 1830s, cotton fields stretched from the Atlantic seaboard to Texas, and heavy migration led to statehood for Arkansas in 1836 and for Texas and Florida in 1845. Production soared from 300,000 bales of cotton in 1830 to nearly 5,000,000 bales in 1860, and the South produced 3/4 of the world's cotton supply. The cotton kingdom was also a slave empire, as the cotton boom rested on the backs of African-American slaves. As cottona griculture expanded westward, whites shipped more than 1,000,000 slaves from the Atlantic coast across the continent in the "Second Middle Passage" mass deportation. The earliest arrivals faced the hardest work, literally cutting plantations from forests.

The slave population grew enormously, rising from 700,000 in 1790 to 2 million in 1830 and to 4 million in 1860. By 1860, the South contained more slaves than all the other slave societies in the Americas combined. The slave population grew through natural reproduction instead of through the Atlantic slave trade (unlike Cuba and Brazil), as the importation of slaves had been outlawed in 1808; by midcentury, most US slaves were native-born southerners. By 1860, one in every three Southerners was black, approximately 4 millino blacks to 8 million whites. In the Lower South states of Mississippi and South Carolina, blacks constituted the majority, while, in the North, only one Northerner in seventy-six was black by 1860 (250,000 blacks to 19 million whites). Southern culture would be shaped in part by blacks, as Southern language, food, music, religion, and even accents was influenced by the presence of large numbers of African-Americans.

After 1820, attacks on slavery from blacks and a handful of white southerners and from northern abolitionists jolted southern slaveholders into making extraordinary efforts to strengthen slavery. During the 1820s and 1830s, state legislature constructed slave codes that required the total submission of slaves. Intellectuals joined legislators in the campaign to strengthen slavery, with clergymen claiming that the Bible, properly interpreted, sanctioned slavery; Old Testament patriarchs ownned slaves, and, in the New Testament, Saint Paul returned the runaway slave Onesimus to his master. Some Southerners attacked the unfair capitalism of the North, while others used black inferiority as an excuse, or even the excuse that slavery was a mass civilizing effort that lifted blacks from barbarism and savagery, taught them disciplined work, and converted them to Christianity.